000: Designated Missing
by Miyajima
Summary: A trainer on Cinnabar Island uncovers something the researchers would have preferred to remain hidden.


_"How is it?"  
_

_"It seems to be stable... It's been connected to the mainframe, and the program's been loaded. Now we just need to run the tests."_

_"Just think, this could revolutionize... Well, everything!"_

_"Mm... It'll be interesting. Converting a living organism into a data stream for storage and tracking. Perhaps this'll finally be the island's big break."_

_"Oh, something's flashing... What's that?"_

_"It's awake."_

* * *

A soft breeze was blowing in from the sea while the young trainer looked out over the water. By his side, a loyal Wartortle that he'd been training for the past couple of years since he started travelling. Five badges glittered on his jacket, reflecting the sun's rays as they warmed the island, already well known for its fiery temperament.

Cinnabar Island had, for many years, been home to scientists and researchers who studied Pokémon in their natural habitat along the shore and on the island's volcano. In time past, an entire mansion had been dedicated to the work of research and development, but it had burnt down following an unexplained laboratory accident a few years previously. Now the scientists had a new research station and rumour had it that they were even able to extract DNA from preserved tissue in fossils to re-create extinct species of Pokémon.

However, the trainer who stood on the shore of the island was largely ignorant of this, and had travelled to the island to train in the Gym, which, taking inspiration from the looming volcano that dominated the island, specialized in fire-type Pokémon. The Trainer's Wartortle had proved highly effective against the gym's own Pokémon, and after a successful day's training and exercise, the Trainer stood watching the waves lap against the shore.

He gave a nod to the awaiting Wartortle, who dove into the water, shortly followed by the Trainer himself. Clambering on to the Pokémon's back, he guided it away from the shore and along the rock-filled reefs and islets that surrounded Cinnabar Island.

He sped along the water as his Wartortle surfed, weaving between jutting spars of rock, sandbars, and hidden reefs. The Trainer let his Wartortle drift without giving it directions, and just enjoyed the ride.

Shortly they came to a small island, hardly more than a large rock with sandbanks surrounding it. The Wartortle clambered up the beach and the Trainer jumped off, letting it rest. The Trainer himself, however, decided to explore the little island. He circled the great rock that formed the island's foundation until he found a crack in the stone, wide enough for him to squeeze through. He dug through his backpack and took out a torch, shining it through the opening. He noticed that the crack widened into a small chamber, and decided to investigate.

He climbed through the crack with little difficulty and came into the centre chamber, barely tall enough to stand up in. He shone his torch around. The walls were smooth, but that would be expected in a sea cave, where the water flowing in and out of the chamber would smooth the stone, but he could see ridges at intervals along the wall. He ran a finger along one of the ridges and found that it wasn't rock, but cement, in them. He took another look at the walls and realised that the chamber had been constructed for some purpose. As he passed the torch along the floor, a glint caught his eye as something in the sand littering the floor of the cavern caught the light of his torch. Clearing away the sand that covered it, he found a small sphere that bore a vague resemblance to a pokéball, but was completely white and bore no markings, nor even a switch on the front to open it. It had been lying on a floor of concrete, and the Trainer guessed that it had been covered when the wall where he had climbed through had given way, and sand had been washed into the chamber with the flow and ebb of the tide.

Placing the strange pokéball on his belt, he squeezed back through the crack in the wall and looked at the rock from the outside. On the outside it appeared to be a perfectly natural rock formation. A thought crossed his mind that the pokéball had been sealed into the chamber on this small island, and then pokémon had been directed to erect a wall of natural rock around it as an extra measure to keep the thing buried.

He took the pokéball from his belt and turned it over carefully in his hands. He walked back around the rock until he found his Wartortle, who was sitting on the small beach and waiting for him. It showed only a vague interest in the pokéball. The Trainer turned it over in his hands again, looking for some way to open it. He pressed the place where the switch would've been on the standard red and white "PokéBall" model, and heard a small click as a metal panel was pressed down.

Holding it as he would a standard ball, he pressed it again, activating the lock and releasing the signal to convert the contained Pokémon's energy signal into matter. The familiar red light arced from the switch and began to form itself on the sandy beach.

He waited a few seconds, but the light didn't form itself into any familiar shape. The ball itself had stopped emitting, and was now just an empty capsule, but the Pokémon didn't integrate back into a material form. The light continued to spin around itself, forming strange, mis-shapen objects but never coalescing into anything recogniseable.

Taking his PokéDex from his backpack, he let the tool scan the light. There was a small pause as it processed the data, and then it spoke.

"Error. Error. Pokémon Number 000. Designated: Error. Classification: Bird/Normal. There is no data available in the PokéDex to - to - 4 4. H. Y. Error. Missing Data cannot be recall-recall-recall-recall-pPkMnp. Q. Bad. Egg. Missing Data cannot be recall-"

The Trainer muted the Pokédex, the slow mechanical tone he was so used to hearing was oddly disturbing as it spewed out its gibberish. He looked at the screen. In the place of the Pokémon's picture there was an object shaped like a backwards 'L', looking like a static screen on a television. In the fields where data should be provided there were only blank spaces, except for height and weight, which were oddly assigned to 10'0'' and 3507.2lbs respectively. He pointed it back at the swirling and shapeless light, which was becoming hard to look at. It was almost as if the area around it was distorted, light seemed to curve inwards towards the creature, bending the terrain around it. Scanning again, the PokéDex only returned pure gibberish - long strings of random characters and punctuation from more than one alphabet, punctuated by spaces of dead pixels. The Trainer tried to power it down, but the tool proved unresponsive to any inputs or commands. The Trainer closed it and went to place it back into his backpack. He knelt down to put it back, only to find his backpack was overflowing with town maps, spilling out onto the beach where the bag had burst a seam.

He looked back at the light creature, and watched in a mixture of horror and intrigue as it took a form; a skeleton of a kabutops, much like the model he had seen only earlier in the day at the research lab on Cinnabar Island. It stood there for a brief moment before collapsing into a pile of bones, and ceased to move. The terrain around it gained its normal appearance.

The Trainer inched closer to the bones, and took an empty pokéball from his belt. He carefully aimed it at the pile of bones and activated the capture mechanism. The bones disentegrated back into the red light and were sucked into the ball, which clicked loudly and played the tinny little tune that announced a Pokémon had been 'caught'. The Trainer picked up his PokéDex again, which had switched itself off. He powered it back on and set it to scan the pokéball's contents and download data.

The PokéDex's two main screens went blank for a few seconds, and then the entire device shut itself down once more. Deciding not to pursue the matter, the Trainer, after discarding over one hundred town maps, put the PokéDex back into his backpack and fixed the ball with the mysterious new Pokémon to his belt.

He turned to his Wartortle and told it to start surfing back to Cinnabar Island. Instead of responding, however, the Pokémon just looked confused, looking around as if it was unsure where the voice came from. The Trainer repeated the command, and waved his hand in front of the Wartortle. It dawned on him with a sudden horror that he couldn't see his arm and hand. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, and looking again, he was able to see himself. The Wartortle looked relieved to see the Trainer and the two began surfing back.

The Trainer decided to take his PokéDex to the research lab to see if they were able to repair it, as it still wouldn't power on, or when it did, would be unresponsive and only show strings of nonsense.

He opened the door of the lab and walked up to the reception desk. Leaning on it, he waited for the researcher behind the desk to finish her telephone conversation. She nodded at him, acknowledging his presence, then looked back down at a paper she was holding. The door swung open, and the Trainer looked over his shoulder to see who had come into the building.

His eyes widened as he saw himself walking through the door and coming up to the reception desk, where, like a ghost, the second him leant against the desk for a few moments, then looked over his shoulder. The door swung open again and a second copy of himself walked into the building, across to the desk, and leant on it. The Trainer moved aside slightly and watched as the door opened a third time and another copy repeated his actions. The researcher looked up from her paper and dropped the phone's receiver in alarm as she saw the perfect, ghostly clones of the Trainer repeat his actions in an endless loop.

She stammered and shook her head, and the clones vanished, leaving only the Trainer standing there looking bewildered and not a little scared. He composed himself and told her what he'd seen on the small island and explained that his PokéDex had stopped functioning when it attempted to scan the creature.

The researcher took both the PokéDex and the pokéball from the Trainer and led him through to the laboratory. Connecting the PokéDex to a computer, she told a second researcher to take a look at it, while she placed the pokéball into a computer uploader, used by trainers and researchers alike to store their Pokémon in virtual environments as data patterns on a computer's hard drive. It had been a revolutionary breakthrough at its inception, allowing a trainer to have access to any Pokémon they had caught from any upload station in the world. The technology led to the inception and construction of the Pokémon Centre, where a trained nurse could care for the creatures both in physical manifestation and also in their virtual lives, healing any injury and purging any toxin from the system.

"But we didn't get it right first time." The researcher said as she powered on the computer and logged herself in. "Bill - the original programmer of the upload algorithms - was an excellent mathemetician and programmer but he needed laboratories like ours to test his work. An algorithm is only good on paper, but we made it work. We successfully uploaded the first Pokémon into the computer systems, converting them into energy and data." She paused for a few seconds and spun slowly in her chair. "... The initial experiments didn't go well. Pokémon were killed, usually instantly and painlessly. Occasionally they'd be caught in other data streams and patterns and we'd be forced to purge the data from the system, which killed them, but ended their misery. But some of the experiments... In some of them, the Pokémon survived. The upload would sometimes force an evolutionary response from the Pokémon, which preserved it from death, but... It would corrupt their data in the uploads. Usually we just deleted them, too, but there were a few we were able to recover."

She tapped at the keyboard and brought up the Pokémon Storage System, showing the little sprites that represented a Pokémon in a little virtual world.

"We sealed away the 'failed' experiments. Bad P.R. We were so close to getting it right that we couldn't let the activist groups shut us down for the accidents..."

She trailed off and looked in shock at the screen as the little sprites began to disappear, one by one. Within a minute the PC Box was empty. The screen flickered a few times, then went black. It spread out along the laboratory, as all the computers in the building suddenly switched off or crashed.

"... And you found one." She finished, backing away from the computer system.

The Trainer tore his eyes away from the blank screen and looked around for the researcher. He went back along the corridor to the computer his PokéDex was connected to, and found the stall empty. He hurried through the laboratory, which had been bustling with life only a few moments ago and was now empty.

Feeling an overwhelming sense of panic rise up in him, he ran for the door and threw a pokéball to the ground, releasing a Pidgeotto. Flying away from Cinnabar Island, he watched as reality itself began to be distorted around the island, as the buildings disappeared before his eyes, and blocks of terrain suddenly went black, like a dead pixel on a screen.

He shut his eyes, not wanting to see any more.

And then everything went dark.


End file.
